Nowhere is better suited for fostering Oriental languages than St. Petersburg…. Here the passionate poetry of the Arabs, the sumptuous literature of Persia and Turkey, the speculative teachings of the Buddhists, the holy language of the Jews and the hieroglyphs of the Chinese all have their interpreters, their ardent proponents.
—A. V. Popov
A curious structure stands in Staraia Derevnia, at St. Petersburg’s northern edge. On 91 Primorskii Prospekt, the busy thoroughfare that stretches along the Bolshaia Nevka River’s right bank, a three-story block of roughly faceted grayish violet granite, topped by bands of vivid yellow, blue, and red brick, rises amid the trees of what had once been a quiet neighborhood of dachas. On closer inspection, the edifice displays features startlingly out of place in Russia’s most westernized city. The unsuspecting visitor who enters by its southern gate will be puzzled by a massive four-pillar portico entirely unlike the neoclassical variants favored by nineteenth-century Russian architects. Instead of the standard-issue white columns, rectangular pillars and intricate Tibetan capitals support a bright red frieze bearing mirrored discs to ward off evil spirits. Above it rests a gilded eight-spoke dharma wheel flanked by a pair of fallow deer, while two brass cylinders symbolizing Buddhism’s victory adorn the roof. With its sternly angular facade, inward sloping lines, flat roof, and exotic details, the building’s architecture can best be described as a blend of Petersburg moderne and Lhasa traditional.
Consecrated in 1915 by the Buriat Lama Agvan Dorzhiev, the temple in Staraia Derevnia did not enjoy an easy birth. At the turn of the twentieth century, Dorzhiev had served as the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s emissary to the Romanov court, and it was on his initiative that the Buddhist datsan, or monastic house of worship, had been built. The temple was meant for St. Petersburg’s small community of Buriats and Kalmyks, Asian minorities faithful to the Yellow Hat Buddhism of Tibet, much as a variety of churches, synagogues, and a mosque ministered to the spiritual needs of the other creeds represented in the multiethnic empire’s capital.1
Nicholas II had approved the datsan in early 1909, in the wake of the 1905 October Manifesto’s promise of religious toleration, but it soon roused the ire of some less open-minded Russians. The Orthodox Synod objected that the site’s location near the old Blagoveshchensk Church and cemetery might offend its believers, while others worried that the “idolatrous temple” would propagate “paganism” in the heart of Christian Russia. At the same time, reports that the Japanese embassy was subsidizing the Buddhist venture aroused fears of the pan-Mongolist specter. Under strong pressure from the interior ministry’s Department of Foreign Creeds, Nicholas II’s premier, Petr Stolypin, convinced the tsar to reverse the decision within a few months. Objecting to “the difficulty of placing [the datsan’s] Buddhist residents under civilian surveillance because of its distance from the city center,” Stolypin arranged to have construction effectively halted.2
The temple did have some influential friends. Not long after buying the Staraia Derevnia site, Lama Dorzhiev had astutely invited a number of prominent orientologists to join an advisory committee. Headed by Fedor Shcherbatskoi, a Sanskritist from St. Petersburg University’s Faculty of Oriental Languages, the group included two of his colleagues specializing in Mongolian, as well as Academicians Sergei Oldenburg and Vasilii Radlov. Dorzhiev also tapped the artist Nikolai Roerich and a newspaper publisher with a passion for Buddhist art, Prince Esper Ukhtomskii. It was a wise move, for the scholars proved to be the project’s most effective advocates. Shcherbatskoi and Oldenburg both appealed to Stolypin to allow work on the temple to proceed. Their pleas initially fell on deaf ears, but by luck Shcherbatskoi’s wife happened to be related to the interior minister’s deputy, Sergei Kryzhanovskii. When the latter interceded, Stolypin gave way.
The protests quickly resumed with renewed fury. Typical of their vitriol was a pamphlet by Archimandrite Varlaam, who thundered, “The power of darkness and the reign of the Antichrist are upon us, since a temple of idolaters has opened in … the capital…. This is nothing less than the ancient dragon-serpent’s assault on Christ.”3 Meanwhile, the Department of Foreign Creeds spared no effort in trying to sabotage the project, policemen repeatedly warned their superiors of Buddhist subversion, and more malicious individuals sent anonymous death threats to Dorzhiev. By contrast, St. Petersburg’s orientologists continued to be enthusiastic supporters of the datsan. When Dorzhiev led a lavish benediction service on August 10, 1915, Oldenburg and Shcherbatskoi, as well as other distinguished scholars, attended the ceremony. Shortly after the October Revolution of 1917, the two academics successfully petitioned the Cheka to spare Dorzhiev’s life following the lama’s arrest on charges of smuggling valuables across the border. Shcherbatskoi proved unable, however, to prevent the temple, which had been placed in his care, from being pillaged by Red Army troops during the subsequent Civil War.
The role of many of St. Petersburg’s leading orientologists in defending the religious rights of the empire’s Buddhist minorities during the temple controversy was no aberration. Indeed, as orientology became established as a discipline in the tsarist academy, its practitioners tended to respect the cultures and peoples they studied. There were exceptions, particularly in the Orthodox Church’s institutions of higher learning, and many were not entirely free of their prejudices, but on the whole educators in Imperial Russia’s university departments of Oriental letters rarely saw Asians as some inferior, contemptuous, or malevolent “other.” No-where was this truer than at St. Petersburg, whose Faculty of Oriental Languages exercised a virtual monopoly in the field during the nineteenth century’s latter half.
St. Petersburg University’s Fakul’tet vostochnykh iazykov (Faculty of Oriental Languages) was formally inaugurated at noon on August 27, 1855. (By ironic coincidence, this was the very same hour when Britain and its allies launched their final assault on the Crimean bastion of Sevastopol.)4 The new faculty boasted fourteen instructors in five sections for the languages of the Islamic Near East, Inner Asia, East Asia, and the Caucasus, as well as Hebrew. Chairs would subsequently be added for Sanskrit, Japanese, Korean, and Tibetan, as well as Asian history and Islamic law. Mirza Kazem-Bek, the first dean, could rightly boast in his opening address that “Nowhere else in Europe have as many orientologists ever gathered in one academic institution as here; nowhere else have all branches of Asia’s languages and literatures ever been joined so closely as in our faculty. And, moreover, never have such numbers of native representatives of Eastern learning and Western scholars of the Orient ever been together in a single place as among us.”5
The overwhelming majority of students entered the Near Eastern departments, whose languages were also in the greatest demand by the foreign ministry, their most likely future employer. Enrollments were often driven by Russian colonial expansion. The tsarist small wars in Turkestan from the 1860s to the 1880s drew even more undergraduates into the Arabic-Persian-Turco-Tatar section, while the drive in East Asia at the turn of the twentieth century encouraged many to sign up for Chinese and Manchu.6
Sometimes the curriculum was designed to send a diplomatic message. At the height of the Crimean War, the Asian Museum’s director, Bernhard Dorn, offered courses in Afghan to remind London about the vulnerability of British India. He explained to Education Minister Avraam Norov that “The English, who so unjustly began their war against Russia, have long been terrified about Russia’s advance in Central Asia. Afghanistan is the barrier between Russia and England’s possessions in India…. [The English] tremble thinking that Russia might take a step there…. England’s Parliament will be stunned when it learns that Afghan is being publicly taught in Russia.7
Like most of the students, the education ministry saw St. Petersburg’s Faculty of Oriental Languages primarily in vocational terms. A letter by the university’s rector (a government appointee) in 1888 to the minister was typical of such attitudes: “Our civilizing mission in the East and the political confirmation of our power and influence in all corners of Asia will not succeed unless we carefully prepare for it, unless along with military measures we train men who know these regions, their way of life, beliefs and languages.”8 So important was the imperative to educate officials with knowledge of the East that, when the rest of St. Petersburg University was shut down during the student disturbances of 1861, the orientology faculty received special dispensation from the tsar to stay open.9
Yet if the autocracy considered the faculty to be a tool for imperial ambitions, its professors often saw things differently. While the members of Kazan University’s Oriental Department had tended to regard their principal duty to be training interpreters and other government officials, St. Petersburg’s professors generally favored more scholarly aims. Dean Kazem-Bek, who had begun his career at Kazan, was an exception. He often spoke about the need to stress practical training over scholarship. But he was decidedly in the minority. Those who preferred the latter prevailed, and within three years Kazem-Bek resigned as dean over the question.10 In 1864 the newly hired historian Vasilii Grigor’ev wrote on behalf of his colleagues: “No matter how important, the Faculty’s practical goals are only part of its duties, and they accompany the most important task—just as in all other faculties—namely the academic study and dissemination of knowledge.”11 Even when Alexander III’s university statute of 1884 tried to stress the primacy of the Oriental faculty’s vocational mission, its professors successfully parried the move.12
This did not mean that St. Petersburg’s orientologists refused to serve the state in more direct ways. Like members of other faculties, some also held posts in various ministries and commissions.13 Not surprisingly, Mirza Kazem-Bek was particularly active in this regard. Beginning in 1850, he advised the justice ministry on Islamic jurisprudence and even reviewed individual rulings.14 During the Crimean War, Kazem-Bek also taught Turkish to army officers and produced language study aids for the General Staff Academy.15 The central Asian historian Vasilii Grigor’ev served the interior ministry as head of its censorship section for five years, and also sat on its Jewish commission.16 Meanwhile, the Indologist Ivan Minaev briefed the General Staff on affairs in Britain’s South Asian colony.17 But most St. Petersburg professors preferred to focus on scholarship.
The autocracy’s pressure on the faculty to serve its needs more directly was unrelenting. In 1892 Education Minister Count Ivan Delianov asked his superintendent of the Kiev district, the Turkologist Vladimir Vel’iaminov-Zernov, to review the state of orientology at St. Petersburg University. Vel’iaminov’s report was not favorable. Focusing on Near Eastern languages, he found students’ knowledge “mediocre at best” and their academic preparation “rather weak.” In his opinion, the main problem was the practice of requiring everyone enrolled in the section to study all three major languages (Arabic, Persian and Turkic-Tatar) rather than fully mastering one of them.18 Not surprisingly, the faculty vigorously rebutted Vel’iaminov’s critique. If its graduates were inadequately prepared, they countered, that was largely due to insufficient resources. As for limiting them to a single language, that was pedagogically unsound because of the historical links between all three.19
Frustrated by his inability to bring the Oriental faculty to heel, the minister commissioned inquiry after inquiry, to little effect.20 The most thoughtful analysis was by a Moscow University emeritus professor of Latin with an interest in Asian languages, Fedor Korsh. In his brief of 1896, Korsh pointed out that the shift away from vocational training was only natural: “Having gradually moved from the practical to the theoretical … the Oriental Faculty, which considers itself to be part of an institution of higher learning, has moved in step with Western scholars of the East. In carrying out their academic pursuits, [our orientologists] are paying less attention to practical matters.” Castigating its professors for preferring scholarship to practical teaching was basically to say that “the Oriental Faculty is guilty for behaving like a university faculty.” Ultimately, Korsh concluded, the minister’s desire was unrealistic. If he wanted to train government officials in Asian languages, he should establish a practical institute to that end.21
Perhaps one reason St. Petersburg’s professors were able to resist the autocracy was that there were alternatives, such as the Lazarev Institute for Oriental Languages in Moscow.22 Established in 1814 by a prominent Armenian family as a school for fellow nationals, its curriculum featured the languages of the Near East and the Caucasus. Russians were also welcome, and as the state’s interest in these regions grew during the nineteenth century, so did its involvement in the establishment. In 1871 Education Minister Count Dmitrii Tolstoi organized a special advanced three-year course at the Lazarev Institute modeled on St. Petersburg University’s orientology curriculum, but with a much more practical orientation. Primarily aimed at training dragomans and consular officials, it included instruction in Arabic, Persian, and Turco-Tatar, with optional courses in Armenian and Georgian.
The autocracy’s temporary infatuation with the Far East at the turn of the twentieth century inspired a similar initiative in Vladivostok.23 The Trans-Siberian Railway, as well as equally ambitious plans in northern China in the wake of the 1896 alliance with the Qing dynasty, made the need for officials competent in East Asian languages particularly urgent. In 1899 Finance Minister Sergei Witte, the chief architect of Nicholas II’s Pacific adventure, accordingly arranged for an Oriental Institute (Vostochnyi institut) to be opened in the port. With a mandate to prepare “individuals for administrative and commercial-economic activities,” the school taught Chinese as well as Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Manchu, and, beginning in 1906, Tibetan. Students flocked to Vladivostok’s Oriental Institute, which by 1916 had graduated some three hundred civilians and over two hundred officers.
One of the most distinguished professors in St. Petersburg University’s Oriental faculty was Vladimir Petrovich Vasil’ev, who taught Chinese there for nearly half a century. A product of the Kazan school, Vasil’ev continued many of its traditions in the capital, including the emphasis on language training in Asia, a strong reliance on primary sources, and an objective but not unsympathetic attitude toward the East. At the same time, the professor’s outlook on the world, which combined scientific materialism, faith in progress, and oppositional political inclinations, were typical of Russia’s post-Romantic intelligentsia.
Vasil’ev was born in 1818 in Nizhnyi Novgorod, a Volga market town upriver from Kazan. While his father was a minor functionary in the provincial administration, both parents came from the clerical caste, and the boy was first educated by a deacon in the family. Vasil’ev père soon recognized his son’s talent for learning, and he began to prepare the boy for university by sending him to the city’s gymnasium. Vladimir’s ambitions were almost derailed when his father died in 1832, leaving his widow and children in straitened circumstances. As a result, the lad had to work for two years as a tutor both to support his mother and to save up for his studies.
Vasil’ev’s early years were not happy. In a brief autobiography written late in life, he devoted three and a half pages to detailing its miseries and only a single paragraph to his professional accomplishments. His first memories were of deaths in the family, his stern father’s beatings, and the hardships of poverty. He sardonically recalled that, as a child, “It occurred to me that the entire world had been created solely to torment me; that everything was illusory—thus was I a self-made Buddhist.”24 His mood never lifted. Disappointment, frustration, and sadness are recurring themes in his biographies. Vasil’ev’s official portrait, photographed at the height of his scholarly prominence, is suffused with profound melancholy.
In the summer of 1834, at the age of sixteen, Vasil’ev moved to Kazan to write the entrance examination for the university’s medical faculty. While he passed, he could not afford the tuition. After relentlessly badgering the rector, the youth was given a scholarship to read Mongolian with Osip Kovalevskii, who had just begun teaching at the Department of Oriental Letters. The better to learn the language, Vasil’ev lodged with a Buriat lama. The rector’s confidence was well founded. Vasil‘ev’s grades won him a silver medal in his second year, and at the end of the third the education ministry awarded him a 300-ruble prize for a Tibetan composition. He also took on Chinese that year when a former member of the Ecclesiastical Mission to Beijing, Archimandrite Daniil (Sivillov), joined the department. Vasil’ev continued to sail through his studies, earning Kazan’s first master’s degree in Mongolian letters in 1839 with his thesis, “On the Foundations of Buddhist Philosophy.”
Even before Vasil’ev had graduated, Kovalevskii saw a future colleague in him. There were plans to set up a chair in Tibetan, and his student seemed to be a good candidate for the post. The respect was mutual. Despite disliking the hostility of his teacher’s compatriots toward Russia, Vasil’ev later recalled, “for my development and for my singular views about scholarship and the state, I am nevertheless obliged to the Polish professor (Osip Mikhailovich Kovalevskii)!” He went on to describe Kovalevskii’s most important lessons: “Don’t bow down before the authorities in your search for the truth. Examine all facts sine ira et studio [without malice or favor]. Never consider any question definitively settled.”25
Kovalevskii proposed a rigorous program to train Vasil’ev for his academic career, to be carried out as a member the Orthodox Church’s twelfth mission to Beijing for its full ten-year term. As often happened with promising young Russian scholars sent to foreign lands for further study, there were multiple sets of daunting instructions. His professor wanted him to master Tibetan and the region’s other major languages, learn about every surrounding Asian nation, prepare teaching aids, keep a diary, and prepare an extensive list of Chinese and Manchu books. Meanwhile, on behalf of the Academy of Sciences, Isaac Schmidt simply asked that Vasil’ev report on everything “that strikes you of interest to scholarship.”26 Vasil’ev himself had goals too. Not only did he hope to acquire a comprehensive understanding of Buddhism, but he also planned “to add to this a knowledge of China, as well as its history and secular literature, shed light on contested aspects of Central Asia, and acquaint myself with Manchu, Korean and Turkic.”27
Vasil’ev joined the mission in January 1840 as it stopped in Kazan on its way through Siberia and Mongolia to Beijing. The mission was under the aegis of the Foreign Minister, Count Karl Nesselrode, who thoroughly disliked Education Minister Sergei Uvarov, thereby complicating Vasil’ev’s life in the distant Far East. Nor were matters helped by the fact that the mission’s domineering head, Archimandrite Polikarp (Turganov) resented a layman’s presence among his clerics. Life at the mission itself was lonely and spartan, while the Chinese capital proved to be a tremendous disappointment. Instead of encountering something akin to “the wonders of the Orient one had read about in the Thousand and One Nights,” as Vasil’ev had anticipated, he found Beijing a vast, arid, and malodorous expanse of entirely uninteresting architecture, where “dirt and unpleasantness” greeted him at every step.28
Vasil’ev obeyed his teacher’s injunction neither to become a Sinophile nor a Sinophobe during his Beijing sojourn. Over the course of his long career, he would remain a leading authority on the Middle Kingdom’s politics. As his articles and commentaries show, he did not allow his own unhappy experience to color his opinions about China.29 Vasil’ev’s first public statement was his inaugural lecture at Kazan in 1850, “On the Meaning of China.”30 After some obligatory grumbling about Russians’ ignorance of their eastern neighbor, he went on to debunk various Western stereotypes. For one thing, Asia was hardly uniform, since there were just as many differences between “the Confucian’s dry empiricism, the healthy faith of Buddhism and the dreamy legends of the Veda” as between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the West.31
Anyway, Vasil’ev wondered, “What are East and West?” After all, Moscow is east of Jerusalem, and the city of Perm, just west of the Ural Mountains (generally considered the boundary between Europe and Asia) lies at the same longitude as the Indus River’s mouth.32 In a later article, he questioned the classical distinction between Orient and Occident in a different way: “The real East includes … neither Persia nor Turkey. These countries have long been closely tied to that part of Europe we consider to be the West. Persia and Turkey are nothing more than the southern West, just as Russia and Scandinavia are the northern West. The real East consists of the areas ruled by China, with India to the south and Siberia to the north.”33
Whatever the East was, Vasil’ev strenuously objected to seeing it as an “other.” His guiding principle was that “man, wherever he may live, remains man.” While there were some differences, these were largely due to the independent historical development of Eurasia’s two halves. As David Wolff has noted, Vasil’ev’s views about China resembled those of his teacher, Kovalevskii.34 Thus Vasil’ev stressed that China was neither immobile nor unchanging. Given sufficient access to European science and technology, its people would recover their former greatness. Indeed, as he cautioned, China might even overtake the West. But the overall tone of his lecture was optimistic: “We are at the dawn of the age when the separation [between East and West] will vanish. One doesn’t have to be a seer or a great philosopher to make this prediction. We just have to abandon our common preconceptions.”35
Despite the tremendous changes the Qing dynasty would see over the next fifty years, Vasil’ev’s views remained remarkably consistent. He explained, “My ideas and my opinions were all born in China [at the Beijing mission].”36 In his editorial of 1884, “On Chinese Progress,” the professor vigorously refuted “the false theory that classifies intellectual ability by race.”37 And his earlier article of 1859, “The Discovery of China,” had a straightforward explanation for the Middle Kingdom’s current weakness: it was all due to the rapacious Qing dynasty.38 Conquest by the parasitic, alien Manchu nomads in 1644 had sapped the empire of its inherent vitality. As other comments elsewhere would confirm, Vasil’ev had thoroughly assimilated the traditional Chinese prejudice against the nomads of the steppe during his years in Beijing.39
Vasil’ev’s views about Russia’s Asian mission were more ambivalent. Like many of his compatriots, he was convinced that tsarist rule benefited the Oriental peoples under its sway: “Our inorodtsy [Asian minorities] fare better than Russians themselves.”40 The professor also frequently railed against the rapacious colonialism of Britain and other Western powers in the East. At times, he called on his nation to fulfill its Asian manifest destiny: “I love the Orient, which is why I foresee a vast and fruitful enterprise by Russia there, and am convinced that under its aegis, one day we will truthfully be able to say ex oriente lux [out of the East is light].”41 Yet on other occasions Vasil’ev criticized St. Petersburg’s territorial grabs in China. Thus, while he originally opposed returning the central Asian Ili Valley to the Qing, by 1876 he was urging a friend at the foreign ministry, Baron Fedor Osten-Sacken, to hand the territory back in the interests of good relations.42 Some twenty years later, he similarly opposed Russia’s occupation of Port Arthur in Manchuria.43
Vasil’ev also wrote about domestic matters. In 1875 he compiled his prescriptions for reforms in Russia as a manuscript titled “Contemporary Questions.” The first two versions did not pass the censors, but the book finally appeared three years later as Tri voprosa (Three Questions). Adopting the French revolutionary motto of Liberté, égalité, fraternité, the author called for his country’s economic emancipation from Western finance and for all Russians’ access to schools, regardless of class. As for the thorny matter of the countryside, he advocated retaining the commune so that the peasantry could decide its fate collectively.44
A Soviet biographer hastened to point out that Vasil’ev was hardly a radical himself. However, two of his sons would come under the Third Sec tion’s watchful eye for subversive activity during their student days. One of them, Nikolai Vladimirovich, was subsequently exiled to the Arctic port of Archangel in 1878 because of his involvement in worker unrest; he would eventually emigrate to Switzerland. Supported by his father, he remained involved in the labor movement there. Tsarist secret police files include a report that, on May 1, 1892, in Bern, Nikolai “marched at the head of a workers’ procession with a red flag, handing out his leaflet.”45
To Vasil’ev, the long years with the mission in Beijing would be the most difficult of his life. Yet with few distractions and an insatiable appetite for learning, he was able to carry out many of his impossibly extensive instructions. In addition to becoming fluent in Tibetan, Chinese, and Manchu, Vasil’ev compiled a mass of notes during his stay that would nourish much of his scholarship for the rest of his career. The most important of these were for an extensive survey of Buddhism, two volumes of which were eventually published.
He returned to Kazan in September 1850 with a deep knowledge of East Asia’s languages, religions, and history. Pleased with his accomplishments, the university made him an associate (ekstraordinarnyi) professor. Because its occupant had recently died, however, he was appointed to the chair of Chinese and Manchu letters instead of teaching Tibetan. Not content to rest on his laurels, Vasil’ev quickly published several articles on Chinese finances and geography, which won him election to the Imperial Geographical Society. In 1852 he also found the time to wed the rector’s daughter, Sofia Ivanovna Simonova, who would bear him four boys and a girl. Two years later Vasil’ev was promoted to full (ordinarnyi) professor.
Vasil’ev was part of the orientological exodus of 1855 from Kazan to St. Petersburg, where he lectured for another forty-five years, until shortly before his death in 1900. Since Mandarin was offered on no other campus in the empire in the nineteenth century’s second half, the professor entirely dominated Russian Sinology during his long career there. As its longest-serving dean (from 1878 to 1893), he was also a leading figure in the Faculty of Oriental Letters. While some of his colleagues considered him distinctly old guard, he did much to broaden the curriculum to include more languages, including Hindi, Tibetan, Korean, and Japanese.
The professor largely carried on his alma mater’s pedagogical practices at St. Petersburg University. Most important was his disregard of Western orientology. Even more than many of his Kazan colleagues, Vasil’ev based both his scholarship and teaching entirely on Asian texts. While he kept abreast of European trends, he did not consider them significant. As he wrote in one of his studies of Buddhism, “of course, Russian, French, English and German scholars have written a great deal about the subject. I am familiar with most of their works, but they weren’t the ones that taught me about Buddhism.” Vasil’ev proudly maintained that his decade in Beijing had given him a unique perspective: “I’ve already often said, I am convinced that I consulted many more sources than the other scholars.”46
Like Mirza Kazem-Bek and Osip Senkovskii, Vasil’ev strongly advocated teaching the current, living language rather than the classics. In an article of 1886 he remarked that, whereas in academics more generally the trend was away from classicism toward “more realistic learning,” the same could not be said about languages. Invoking a Darwinian metaphor, Vasil’ev suggested that “It is as if studying [freshwater] roaches and jellyfish is more elevated and noble than understanding the language, literature and history of a living people.” He wondered why his faculty taught Sanskrit (“just as dead as Greek and Latin”) rather than modern Hindi.47
Two years after St. Petersburg’s Oriental faculty was founded, some of its students complained about the lack of proper textbooks.48 Those who were enrolled in Chinese wrote that the only one they had was Father Hya cinth’s “very unsatisfactory” grammar of 1835. Vasil’ev took their concerns to heart. Despite only meager funds, over the next decade the professor compiled readers and dictionaries for both Chinese and Manchu. The system he devised for organizing Chinese characters, which was phonetic in contrast to the Western practice of arranging them by radicals, was still being used in Soviet-era Russian dictionaries. Vasil’ev also differed from other nineteenth-century European Sinologists in his views about Chinese grammar and language. While his colleagues tended to believe that Chinese was much less sophisticated than Indo-European languages, Vasil’ev saw things quite differently: “Man is the same everywhere. If the Chinese brain is structured like the European’s, how can we assume that there is no grammar in the former, especially when it has been thinking and expressing thoughts for whole millennia?”49
Vasil’ev’s life ambition had been to write the first systematic examination of Buddhism in China and Inner Asia. Based on his toils in Beijing, he foresaw a six-volume collection that would examine the religion’s dogma, literature, and history, as well as including the seventh-century travel account by the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang. Vasil’ev’s most important innovation was to consider Buddhist beliefs as a whole, rather than focusing on individual texts, as most of his contemporaries did.50 To him, the faith was a coherent, organic body of thought that was continually evolving. Thus the sutras should not be seen as unchanging, but rather as illustrating “the history of the Buddha’s teachings in a specific period.”51
Vasil’ev never completed his projected study. His teaching, his interest in current events, and possibly bouts of depression as well distracted him from publishing more than two volumes. The first, a general survey, appeared in Russian in 1857 and was subsequently translated into German and French to largely favorable reviews.52 Likening his achievement in producing the first comprehensive analysis of Buddhism to the periodic table of the elements, Fedor Shcherbatskoi called him “the Mendeleev of our orientology.”53 Twelve years later Vasil’ev managed to complete the second book, a history of Buddhism in India drawn from Tibetan sources.
Despite devoting much of his career to the faith, he was no closet Buddhist. The Soviet Sinologist Vasilii Alekseev was probably right in suggesting that Vasil’ev tended toward atheism.54 What is certain is that the professor’s views were in line with the scientific materialism of the intelligentsia at the time, which did not encourage confessional fervor. Vasil’ev’s academic interests also reflected a broader trend in Russian orientology. If philology had dominated the discipline in the nineteenth century’s first half, scholars were now tending more toward the study of religion. In his own words, “nothing gives us a greater understanding of a man than his creed.”55
Given his contributions to scholarship, it took Vasil’ev surprisingly long to be elected to full membership in the Academy of Sciences. He only won the honor in 1886, a year before his university celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his academic career. According to one scholar, the delay may have been due to the professor’s aversion to publishing in any language other than Russian, which made much of his work inaccessible to the West. There was also his propensity to polemicize, which offended some academicians.56 At the same time, Vasil’ev committed the egregious scholarly sin of being both a generalist and a popularizer, of writing about too many subjects for too broad an audience.
The academy’s regulations at the time stated that full members could not continue teaching without a cut in pay. When Vasil’ev accordingly tried to retire from the university, his superiors urged him to stay on with a reduced course load. One of the reasons he faced resistance was the difficulty of finding a proper replacement. Two of his students, Sergei Georgievskii and Aleksei Ivanovskii, were hired with the hope that they might succeed their aging mentor, but premature death claimed the former while the latter succumbed to alcoholism and madness. When Vasil’ev died in April 1900, Sinology at St. Petersburg University was dealt a heavy blow.
On August 20, 1876, the Oriental faculty’s dean, Vasilii Grigor’ev, formally opened the Third International Oriental Congress in St. Petersburg University’s great hall. After “some fine singing,” and accompanied by “representatives of about a dozen different nationalities arrayed in their native garb,” he began his remarks in the organization’s official language, French: “Consumed by religious and political frenzy, Europe and Asia are in a state of agonizing turmoil…. Race arms against race. One faith takes up the banner against another…. [Yet] in this ocean of unbridled passions, there is a haven where they do not dare intrude, a sanctuary that gives us a soothing foretaste of happier times to come. That refuge is scholarship.” Having stressed science’s role as an arena for peaceful cooperation, Grigor’ev went on to proclaim his country’s continental identity: “The edifice that shelters you right now is one of the oldest in St. Petersburg; it was built, one could say, by the very hands of Peter the Great, that creator of modern Russia. Here we are all in the shadow of that august monarch who took us into the great family of the nations of the West.”57
The congress was the brainchild of the French Japanologist Léon de Rosny. To legitimize the discipline’s standing within academe, he had first convened an international meeting of orientologists at Paris’s Sorbonne in 1873. London hosted a second session the following year, and there would be thirteen more before the First World War. Like the world’s fairs, industrial exhibits, and other cross-border gatherings in the age of nationalism, academic conferences provided an opportunity for the host country to show off. The event in St. Petersburg was no exception. When not engaged in their scholarly discussions, the fifty or so delegates who came from abroad were treated to special displays of Islamic art, Oriental manuscripts, and artifacts from the empire’s Asian minorities, as well as lavish banquets and an excursion to the imperial palace at Peterhof.
The choice of St. Petersburg as the site for the third congress was a clear indication of Europe’s respect for Russia’s orientologists. It also heralded a change in the discipline’s relationship with the West. When initially established at the Academy of Sciences in the early eighteenth century, foreigners had dominated the study of Asia. During the university’s first five decades, the leading scholars had tended to remain largely aloof from their colleagues in the West. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, however, St. Petersburg’s orientologists now increasingly began to think of themselves as part of the European scholarly community.
The moving force behind this development was the Arabist Baron Viktor Romanovich Rosen, who succeeded Vasil’ev as the faculty’s dean in 1893. As his name suggests, Baron Rosen’s background was very different from his predecessors’. Born into a German noble family in the Baltic port of Reval (now Talinn, Estonia), his outlook was Western rather than Eastern.58 He enrolled at St. Petersburg University in 1866 to read Near Eastern letters, but unlike earlier generations of Russian orientologists, he completed his studies not in Asia but in Europe. After a year with Leipzig’s renowned Heinrich Fleischer, he taught Arabic at the faculty from 1872 until his premature death in 1908.
The baron’s scholarship focused on medieval Islamic manuscripts at the Asian Museum. While he made important contributions in this respect (Byzantinists still rely on his studies of relations with the Arab world), his most significant achievements were in teaching and administration. Exaggerating only slightly, one student, Ignatii Krachkovskii, claimed that Rosen’s “name is tied to our entire new school of orientology.”59 In addition to the former, Rosen trained a number of other prominent early Soviet orientologists, including Vasilii Barthold, Sergei Oldenburg, and Nikolai Marr. Above all, he strove to instill in them his own respect for European scholarship. As Vera Tolz points out, Rosen insisted that everyone preparing for a teaching post at his faculty complete their training in the West to become acquainted with its pedagogy and research, much as he had done himself.60
Despite this cosmopolitan outlook, not to mention his German heritage, Rosen was loyal to his empire and he strongly defended Russian as a scholarly language.61 In this respect, he was not very different from other St. Petersburg orientologists with foreign blood, such as Mirza Kazem-Bek and Osip Senkovskii. Indeed, the baron promoted contacts with the West in part so that the achievements of Russian scholarship might be better known.
Rosen’s most important accomplishment was to take the St. Petersburg school well beyond the campus. His first major endeavor was through the Imperial Russian Archaeological Society’s Oriental section, which elected him its president in 1885. Established nearly forty years earlier, the society had long had a strong interest in the antiquities of the empire’s Asian cultures; Pavel Savel’ev had been among its founding members. Under Baron Rosen, however, it began to take an active role in promoting Russian orientology more generally through the journal he founded the following year, Zapiski Vostochnogo otdeleniia Imperatorskago Russkogo arkheologicheskogo obshchestva (Transactions of the Oriental Section of the Imperial Russian Archaeological Society).
Russia was a latecomer in this respect. Already toward the end of the eighteenth century, William Jones’s Asiatic Society in Bengal had begun publishing its Asiatic Researches, while the French Journal asiatique first appeared in 1823, followed some twenty-five years later by the German Oriental Society’s Zeitschrift (Journal).62 This was not for want of trying in St. Petersburg. In 1818 the historian of Siberia, Grigorii Spasskii, had started his Sibirskii vestnik (Siberian Herald) there, which, despite its name, focused broadly on the study of the East. Subsequently renamed Aziatskii vestnik (Asian Herald) to reflect its interests more accurately, the monthly had a nine-year run.63 Vladimir Vasil’ev had also attempted to found an Aziatskoe obozrenie (Asian Review) in 1865 to be based at the Oriental faculty, but the university’s council turned it down for lack of funds.64
Rosen had planned to publish the Zapiski for a general audience, but it soon became much more academic. While its Russian readership was limited, foreign scholars did pay attention, thanks to the editor’s efforts. Through its reviews and articles the Zapiski became an important vehicle for promoting the achievements of Russian orientology in the West.65
Baron Rosen was also affiliated with the Academy of Sciences, although his relationship with the hallowed institution did not get off on the right foot. When he was first elected in 1879 as a junior (ad”iunkt) member at the relatively young age of thirty-three, the study of Asia there had been languishing for some time. Count Uvarov had tried to encourage the discipline by providing for two places for the history of Asian letters (out of a total of twenty-two for full members) in the academy’s statute of 1836. Over the years, more positions had been added, so that when Rosen was taken on there were three academicians and one associate. None of them was particularly distinguished, and within three years all had died, save a Sanskritist who had long ago returned to his native Germany. As a result, by 1881 Rosen was the only orientologist left, and at the lowest rank to boot.
The early 1880s were particularly troubled for the academy. For some time its reputation had been slipping as the empire’s universities matured. Moreover, public opinion had grown increasingly resentful of the high numbers of foreigners who held the coveted title of academician. To many Russians, the Academy of Sciences was a “German institution,” an eighteenth-century archaism whose sole function was to provide sinecures for mediocre scholars from abroad. Matters came to a head shortly after Rosen was tapped, when in 1880 the renowned chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev was turned down for membership. Already world famous for having drawn up the periodic table of the elements, he seemed highly deserving of the honor, and his rejection unleashed a furor in the press.66
Mendeleev’s unexpected setback was partly due to a bitter division within the academy. One faction consisted largely of foreign scholars, while the other comprised Russians. Matters were not helped by the often haughty attitude of the former. When a distinguished Russian chemist once complained about their dominance in the institution, a fellow member with Prussian blood snarled, “The Academy is after all not Russian, but rather an Imperial Academy!”67 Many of the native-born academicians also had ties to the empire’s up-and-coming universities, which made them doubly threatening to the “Germans.”
Despite his own Teutonic roots, as a patriotic St. Petersburg University professor Rosen was definitely in the Russian camp. When he tried to convince his colleagues to fill the newly vacant chairs for Asian literature and history, his efforts became entirely mired in their fractious politics. As a result, in 1882 Rosen angrily resigned from the academy.68
The baron’s impetuous move once again earned the institution much public opprobrium. But it had the desired effect, since the Academy of Sciences soon admitted the Turkologist Vasilii Radlov, the Persian specialist Karl Zaleman, and Vladimir Vasil’ev to its membership. Within eight years, Rosen also accepted reelection. Three of the four new academicians taught at the Oriental faculty as well, and all were productive scholars. Before the October Revolution, three more prominent members of the faculty would be invited to join: the Indologist Sergei Oldenburg, the scholar of the Caucasus Nikolai Marr, and the central Asian historian Vasilii Barthold. Most of them would maintain close ties with their university, which considerably lowered the barriers that had previously so separated the two establishments on St. Petersburg’s Vasil’evskii Island. Indeed, according to the academy’s official history, by the 1880s together they basically constituted a single center for orientology in the Russian capital.69
Sergei Fedorovich Oldenburg best exemplified the St. Petersburg school’s new course.70 A specialist in Buddhist folklore and Indian art history, Oldenburg had begun his career at the Oriental faculty but spent most of it with the Academy of Sciences. Like his mentor, Baron Rosen, he saw himself as a member of the European scholarly community rather than a strictly Russian one. And, while he was loyal to his fatherland, Oldenburg strongly championed academic autonomy from the state, although this would prove increasingly difficult after the Romanov dynasty was replaced by a much more ideologically strident regime in 1917.
Sergei Oldenburg traced the beginnings of his interest in orientology to a book about Tibet that had captivated his imagination as a sixth-year secondary school student. But they may well go back much earlier, to his early childhood in the Buriat homeland around eastern Siberia’s Lake Baikal, where his father commanded a Cossack regiment. Hailing from the German Baltic region of Mecklenburg, the Oldenburgs were a military family that had entered Russian service under Peter the Great.71 Sergei’s mother, Nadezhda Berg, was half-French and raised her children in the language. Upon retiring from the army, Oldenburg’s father moved to western Europe, where he sat in on university lectures and attended to his sons’ education. Eventually settling down in Warsaw to send the boys to its gymnasium, the former general died unexpectedly in 1877, when Sergei was only fourteen. Despite the setback, the boy persevered with his schooling, graduating in 1881 with a gold medal. Together with his older brother Fedor, Sergei Oldenburg won admission to St. Petersburg University that year, and he enrolled in the Oriental faculty’s Sanskrit-Persian department. Their mother accompanied them to the imperial capital, where she supported herself by teaching French at the posh Smol’ny Institute for women of gentle birth.
At the time when Oldenburg entered the faculty, Russian Indology was a young discipline in relation to scholarship of the Near East and China.72 The reason was straightforward: Whereas the latter regions bordered on Russia, India did not. As Uvarov’s project for an Asian academy had suggested, St. Petersburg was not immune from Europe’s fascination with Sanskrit at the turn of the nineteenth century. However, the Oriental faculty only officially added a chair for the subject in 1863. The father of Indology in Russia is generally considered to be Ivan Minaev, who taught at St. Petersburg from 1873 until his death in 1890.
Working under Minaev and Vasil’ev, Oldenburg began his academic career by studying Buddhism. Like his teachers, he was not particularly spiritually inclined. As his colleague Shcherbatskoi explained, Oldenburg, like all Russian Indologists, devoted his attention to the faith since that was the link between the South Asian country and his own: “Through Buddhism India becomes our neighbor along our entire Eastern border, from [Lake] Baikal all the way to the Upper Volga.”73 His research initially focused on the religion’s early development. Sergei Fedorovich was particularly intrigued by its popular mythology, and he wrote his master’s thesis, “Buddhist Legends,” about traditional stories of the Buddha’s reincarnation.
This emphasis on folklore may well have reflected Oldenburg’s youthful flirtation with populism.74 As a university student, he became involved in politics. Given the strict restrictions Alexander III had placed on student life in the wake of his father’s assassination in 1881, outside of the revolutionary underground such activity was generally limited to informal discussion circles—although these were generally frowned upon as well. Together with his brother and the future geologist Vladimir Vernadskii, among others, he formed a group with vaguely populist and Fabian leanings.75 Many of its members, including Sergei Fedorovich himself, would later become prominent members of the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party.
Oldenburg also participated in the university’s Student Scientific-Literary Association. One of his acquaintances there was a zoology undergraduate from Simbirsk, Aleksandr Ul’ianov. A man of much more radical inclinations, Ul’ianov was hanged for his involvement in a plot to murder the tsar in 1887. Several years later, his younger brother Vladimir, visiting St. Petersburg to write his law school examinations, looked up Oldenburg to ask about Aleksandr. This would not be the last encounter between Sergei Fedorovich and Vladimir, better known by his revolutionary alias, Lenin.
During his graduate years, Oldenburg grew particularly close to his dean, Baron Rosen. Their extensive correspondence betrays Rosen’s strong influence on Oldenburg’s attitudes toward scholarship, especially when it came to developing links with the West.76 As one of the faculty’s most promising young students, Sergei Fedorovich was sent on a two-year tour of Europe in 1887 (he would never set foot in India, much as Rosen managed to avoid the Near East). Staying in Paris, London, Cambridge, and on various German campuses, he developed a number of lifelong friendships with orientologists abroad. Among the most enduring was with Silvain Lévi, a Parisian Jew who would rise to the summit of his profession as a professor at the Collège de France and the president of the Société Asia tique.77
Oldenburg began teaching Sanskrit at St. Petersburg University in 1889. His years at the Oriental faculty were difficult. While he successfully passed his master’s examination in 1886, it would take him another nine years to defend it. There were personal tragedies. In 1891 his wife died suddenly from tubercular meningitis, leaving him to care for their young son. Oldenburg’s letters to Rosen also allude to his own health problems, which may well have involved depression. At the same time, the young scholar happily took on many extracurricular responsibilities. As a strong supporter of universal education, he became active with the Bestuzhev Higher Women’s Courses, an institution that provided university instruction to the sex that had been excluded from Russia’s campuses by imperial decree in 1863.
Among the scholars Oldenburg had met during his European tour was the British Indologist Thomas William Rhys Davids. He had been particularly impressed with the Briton’s program to publish southern Buddhist texts. Like most Russians who studied the faith, Oldenburg focused on northern Buddhism, that is, the variants that were based on Sanskrit and were dominant around the Himalayas and in Inner and East Asia, as opposed to the Pali-based traditions of Ceylon and southern India that dominated British Indology. In 1897 he began a similar enterprise, the Bibliotheca Buddhica, to reproduce important northern Buddhist works. Funded by the Academy of Sciences, the project was a major international venture. Involving Russian and Western scholars such as Lévi, Albert Grünwedel, Hendrik Kern, and Bunju Nanjio, over the next thirty years some thirty volumes would appear in the series. Oldenburg’s own contribution was a collection of Buriat woodblock prints.
Oldenburg did not disdain writing for a more general audience. He translated short stories by Rudyard Kipling and Anatole France into Russian and published a number of popular articles about Buddhism. Their even-handed approach, which often clashed with the more critical accounts by Orthodox missionaries, made him enemies. Some even whispered that the professor had secretly converted to Buddhism. Oldenburg respected the faith’s ethical tenets (he became a vegetarian), but his true religion was scholarship. Like his teacher Vasil’ev, he studied Buddhism in a fairly objective light as a cultural phenomenon. Oldenburg also shared the Sinologist’s views of the Orient more generally. Thus he saw no great divide between Eurasia’s two halves. In a discussion of the relationship between East and West since the days of pharaonic Egypt, he pointed out that modern science had conclusively proven this to be the case: “History examines [the discoveries of nineteenth-century orientologists] more intensively, as if they are entirely new and unusual phenomena, but soon detects analogies, and even sometimes almost complete coincidence [with the West]. It therefore shows convincingly that we all inhabit the same world, with the same events, the same laws of progress. In the Orient man is, above all, just like man everywhere.” There were, of course differences. Oldenburg acknowledged that “our schoolchildren know more than even the most sophisticated Eastern minds” about science and technology. But Easterners had a far deeper understanding of humanity. He believed that the Asian, “by the power of his intellect, has penetrated the secrets of life. He has studied and explained that which is closest to all mankind—his very humanity.”78
In another article, Oldenburg pointed out that the West’s temporary military superiority made it unbearably arrogant: “Thus the European is accustomed to see himself as the ruler of the world.” But he went on to note: “He is so confident of his superiority that it never even enters his head—unless he happens to be an orientologist or a specialist—that at the time of the Crusades the Europeans were the barbarians in relation to their foes.”79 Oldenburg firmly believed that his profession had an obligation to cure the West of its supercilious attitude. Furthermore, echoing Uvarov’s rationale for his proposed Asian academy a century earlier, he argued that by knowing the East the West would better know itself: “My specialty puts me among the orientologists, who see it as their task to study and understand Asia. We believe that, only by properly comprehending the East with its tremendous cultural achievements can mankind fully understand itself.”80
Oldenburg continued to follow current political developments while teaching at the Oriental faculty. He despaired at the autocracy’s seemingly unrelenting interference in academic life as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Responding to an article he read in The Times about new regulations ordering tsarist university administrators to watch their charges more closely, Oldenburg confessed to Rosen that he yearned for the day “when one can breathe freely in Russia [unlike] now, when all that is honest, that thinks, bows down and is stifled.”81 In the summer of 1899, after another wave of student unrest in St. Petersburg, the university sacked several professors on suspicion of sympathizing with the protests. Oldenburg was livid. He wrote Rosen, “Obviously when men with whom I am in full solidarity are expelled from the universities, I cannot stay there anymore, and when I return [from abroad] I will take the appropriate steps.”82
The professor fully expected that his resignation would kill his academic career. For a time he considered moving to the provinces, to take up a job in the zemstva, local agencies of self-government. His colleagues thought otherwise. There happened to be a vacancy in the Sanskrit chair at the Academy of Sciences, where Baron Rosen and two other Oriental faculty professors were members. Most likely on Rosen’s initiative, Oldenburg was voted in by a large majority of academicians in February 1900.
Oldenburg was intimately involved with the academy in its various incarnations for the remaining thirty-four years of his life. At that institution his administrative talents fully blossomed. Promoted to the rank of academician in 1903, he was elected permanent secretary the following year, a post he would hold until he was dismissed in 1929, Oldenburg worked tirelessly to advance the institution’s interests. Thus he successfully lobbied the Russian Duma (legislature) to boost the perennially underfunded institution’s budget, and he also endeavored to maintain its political independence.
This did not mean that Oldenburg now stood aloof from contemporary affairs. In January 1905, as the unpopular war with Japan was inciting revolutionary unrest in the empire, he was among the seventeen academicians who signed an open letter “On the Needs of Education (Memorandum of 342 Scholars).” Published in the St. Petersburg daily Rus’, it called on the autocracy to halt its interference in the empire’s schools and universities. The statement proclaimed that “academic freedom is incompatible with the current political order in Russia,” going on to condemn the regime’s “police-like policies” in education.83 Not surprisingly, the move earned a stern rebuke from the academy’s president, Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, who upbraided its members for interfering in politics. Along with his colleagues, Oldenburg stood his ground. He defiantly wrote the grand duke, “I am not only an academician. I am also a citizen, and I am unaware of any law … that would forbid me from openly expressing my views about education in Russia.”84 Konstantin Konstantinovich soon relented, and he even issued an apology to the academy’s members.
Oldenburg was particularly concerned about the autocracy’s intolerant attitude toward minority nationalities. In addition to championing Lama Dorzhiev’s temple in the capital, he also participated in the academy’s opposition to Russification in Ukraine. The academician expressed his dismay in a letter of 1910 to his son Sergei (whose politics tended more to the right): “It is horrible that this persecution of minorities goes on everywhere—the Caucasus, Poland, the Volga region, Muslims, not to mention the Jews—tens of millions are being tormented.”85 Oldenburg shared the sentiments of many of his colleagues on this issue. Unlike missionaries and some government officials, scholars at the academy and the university tended to oppose Russification and some even encouraged nationalism among the empire’s inorodtsy.86 As Nathaniel Knight points out, sympathy with the objects of their study “was not an uncommon occupational hazard” among Russian orientologists.87
One of the most telling expressions of Oldenburg’s views about the relationship between learning and society was an essay he contributed, a year before he joined the academy, to an influential collection of essays, Problems of Idealism. Published in 1902, the book was the first of several counter-attacks on the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia’s strident dogmatism by liberals and lapsed Marxists.88 Oldenburg’s contribution, “Renan as Champion of Freedom of Conscience,” focused on a nineteenth-century French scholar of religion who had been persecuted by senior Catholic clergy for his objective approach to the life of Jesus.89
At first glance, the chapter’s robust defense of intellectual freedom could have been seen solely as criticizing the Orthodox Church’s obscurantism under its archconservative chief procurator, Konstantin Pobedonostsev. Yet it had another target as well. Citing Ernest Renan, Oldenburg alluded to the intelligentsia’s nihilism: “The eighteenth century’s skeptics merrily annihilated and saw no need to build a new faith. Their sole concerns were with destruction itself and with being conscious of the living force that animated them.”90
As the academy’s leading orientologist, Oldenburg faithfully carried on Baron Rosen’s legacy to promote the discipline both within the institution and beyond. If before his election to membership there had been four chairs for Asian literature and history, by 1914 there were six. Oldenburg’s standing was confirmed when in 1916 he became the Asian Museum’s director. According to the Sinologist Vasilii Alekseev, who knew him well, it was because of Oldenburg that “despite their small numbers, orientologists have and continue to have such a major role in our scholarship and society.”91
Four years after being elected permanent secretary, Oldenburg complained to his son that, “other than [my administration at] the Academy, I don’t manage to get anything done.”92 He was being a bit hard on himself. The academician did continue to publish, including articles about Buddhist art and Indian literature, as well as the obligatory book reviews. He also led two expeditions in the early 1910s to Turfan, Dunhuang, and other Silk Road sites in Xinjiang. The latter were sponsored by a group Oldenburg had helped to organize over a decade earlier, the Central and East Asian Exploration Fund.93 This international association had been established in 1898 to coordinate efforts among archaeologists, who had been engaged in an intense rivalry to unearth the region’s ancient Buddhist artifacts.94 Having been launched in the same year as Nicholas II’s idealistic peace conference at The Hague, it is perhaps not surprising that European scholars agreed to base the institution in St. Petersburg.
Oldenburg’s reaction to the momentous events of 1917 was typical of his caste. Although he favored retaining the monarchy in some limited form, he did not mourn the tsar’s abdication in February. Like many fellow scholars, he strongly supported the liberal Kadets (Constitutional Democrats), who formed the coalition Provisional Government along with moderate leftists parties in the wake of the February Revolution.95 During the summer the academician even served as education minister in one of Aleksandr Kerenskii’s short-lived cabinets.
When in October Vladimir Lenin’s more militant Bolsheviks seized power in a coup, Oldenburg was horrified. He repeatedly protested the new regime’s excesses and was briefly arrested himself as a counterrevolutionary. When his friend the symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok wrote The Twelve, a lengthy paean likening the Bolsheviks to Jesus Christ and his apostles, Oldenburg replied with a much gloomier verse, “The Dead.” Nevertheless, unlike many others, he did not emigrate. Indeed, by the spring of 1918 the academy’s secretary began to seek an accommodation with the new regime, at times meeting directly with Lenin. For the time being, his efforts were successful. Although many of his fellow academicians abhorred the new political order (there were no Communist Party members among their ranks until 1929), this pragmatic approach helped ensure the institution’s survival.96
Oldenburg even offered the academy’s expertise to the Soviet government on occasion. Thus, according to Francine Hirsch, he engineered a “revolutionary alliance” with the Communist Party on policies towards ethnic minorities.97 Hirsch argues that this partnership was more than a marriage of convenience, since in its early years the party and scholars such as Oldenburg shared similar sentiments about promoting the young Soviet Union’s Asian minorities. But as Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin, readopted a more Russian nationalist line, this arrangement became increasingly tenuous. More important, Stalin’s efforts to impose stricter controls on cultural and intellectual life in the late 1920s effectively subordinated the academy to the Communist Party’s bidding.98
Unlike his earlier efforts to maintain the institution’s autonomy, Oldenburg was unable to deflect the Stalinist “cultural revolution.”99 While he was more flexible than some of his colleagues in dealing with the campaign to sovietize what was now the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, his loyalty to the institution’s scholarly integrity made him the target of attacks on “bourgeois scientists” and “former persons.” In October 1929 Oldenburg was stripped of his post as permanent secretary, and he spent the following nights sleeping fully dressed in anticipation of arrest by the OGPU secret police. Although other academicians did suffer that fate, he never received the dreaded nocturnal summons. Like other leading intellectual lights with an independent streak, such as the poet Anna Akhmatova and his fellow academician Ivan Pavlov, Oldenburg was probably considered too distinguished to be liquidated.
The next year saw the academician’s rehabilitation when he was named head of the new Institute of Orientology. Under the academy’s aegis, this establishment merged the Asian Museum with several other related organizations. Eventually based in Moscow (although the St. Petersburg branch still flourishes in a formal grand ducal palace on the Neva), it remains Russia’s leading institution for the study of the East. In 1933 Oldenburg’s colleagues marked the fifty-year jubilee of his scholarly career with a special session at the Academy of Sciences. He died a peaceful death a year later.
From its founding in 1855 through the century’s close, St. Petersburg University’s Faculty of Oriental Languages was the leading establishment of its kind both in Russia and abroad. There were specialized colleges with a more practical orientation, such as the Moscow’s Lazarev Institute and the Ecole spéciale des langues vivantes orientales in Paris. And many of the West’s great universities, including Cambridge, Leiden, Göttingen, and Yale, boasted chairs for various Asian languages, some of which dated back centuries earlier. However, no other institution of higher education had an entire faculty devoted to the discipline.
Compared to St. Petersburg University’s other sections, such as law and the natural sciences, enrolments at its Oriental faculty were small. If at the turn of the twentieth century there were over 2,000 students in the juridical faculty, only 182, or 5 percent of the total, specialized in Asian languages. Despite the usual complaints to the contrary, the discipline received a disproportionate share of the university’s resources. Of St. Petersburg’s fifty-eight full professors at the time, nine were affiliated with the Oriental faculty, compared to eighteen in law, which had more than ten times the number of students.100 These numbers reflected the field’s importance as a source both of specialists for the autocracy’s Asian ambitions as well as for academic respectability abroad. When in 1916 the prominent classicist Mikhail Rostovtsev surveyed Russian scholarship, he listed orientology as one of his country’s most highly esteemed disciplines internationally.101
Nicholas I had established the Oriental faculty with utilitarian aims in mind, much like Peter the Great and his Academy of Sciences. The Indologist Ivan Minaev recognized the autocracy’s thinking when, in an official address, he proclaimed, “Russia’s interests have always been intimately linked to the East, and therefore … for our scholars Asia cannot be a lifeless, purely bookish object of academic curiosity.”102 St. Petersburg’s professors were government officials and the imperial Table of Ranks carefully delineated their status, as that of any other chinovnik (civil servant). A number of them, like Kazem-Bek, Minaev, and Dmitrii Pozdneev, also served the state in more practical ways.
This did not mean that the scholars who studied the East at St. Petersburg University saw themselves as handmaidens of tsarist imperialism. Regardless of their politics, which ranged from conservative in the case of Grigor’ev to the more progressive views of Vasil’ev and Oldenburg, their interests were more esoteric. What impassioned the orientologists on the Neva was not how to conquer or rule the East, but such questions as the origins of Mahayana Buddhism, pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, or Kushite inscriptions on ancient coins. By the same token, their attitudes toward the East tended to be positive. Unlike their colleagues at the Kazan Theological Academy’s Missionary Division, the scholars of the St. Petersburg school did not disdain the cultures and peoples they studied. Some might deem the governments that ruled over such antiquated empires as Persia and China as autocratic and decrepit, but they rarely saw Persians and Chinese themselves as inherently inferior.
This phenomenon will be familiar to those acquainted with Sovietology on American campuses during the cold war. At that time, as in Imperial Russia, the state devoted enormous resources to studying a region in which it had a strong strategic stake. Yet even if many scholars in the United States benefited from Washington’s largesse during the Cold War, few strongly sympathized with its aims vis-à-vis Moscow.